An Overview on Quality Center Test Management Tool

Quality Center(QC), currently known as Hp-ALM Application Life Cycle Management, is a test management tool. Manual testing is associated with several documents like test cases, requirement traceability matrix etc which are often shared across different resources in a company for reporting, execution and education, at some instances. A conventional means to do this was to share it among the team members via mail or to share a folder, no tool was used for this purpose.

The Quality Center comes with a Quality Center Server which can be used to add our requirements documents, test cases and defects, additionally, all of these documents can be shared with respective team members. Every member can create, Modify and edit the documents and other members can view the changes made.QC server is accessed using QC client and members login to server using a particular username and password given to them.QC manages all testing activities such as preparing test cases, execution and logging defects. Thus, it is called as Test Management Tool.

Number of members who can access Quality Center depends on the license we purchase. The latest version of QC is QC 11.0 and we call it as ALM(Application Lifecycle Management).

With mercury Quality Center, you can:

1. Make go-live decisions with confidence.
2. Standardize and manage the entire quality process.
3. Reduce application deployment defect.
4. Improve application quality and reliability.
5. Manage application change impact through manual and automated functional testing.
6. Ensure quality in strategic sourcing initiatives.
7. Warehouse critical applications quality project data.
8. Test service-oriented architecture services for both functionality and performance.
9. Ensure support for all environments including J2EE,.NET, Oracle and SAP.

Starting Quality Center:

You Launch Quality Center on your machine from your Web Browser.

Now to start Quality Center:

1.Open your Web Browser and type Quality Center URL

http://<Quality Center server name>[<:port number>]/qcbin
The Mercury Quality Center options window opens. Contact your system administrator if you do not have the correct path.

2. Click the Quality Center link.

Files are downloaded to your machine, first time you run Quality Center.
Also, it checks version and if there is a newer version updated files are downloaded to your machine.

Test Management process in QC

Test Management with Quality Center involves four phases:

Specify Requirements: Analyse your application and determine your testing requirements.
Plan Tests: Create a test plan, based on your testing requirements.
Execute tests: Create test sets and perform test runs.
Track Defects: Report defects detected in your application and track how repairs are progressing.

Quality Center Modules

Quality Center has four modules, which are accessible from the sidebar:

Requirements: Enables you to specify testing requirements. This includes defining what you are testing, defining requirement topics and items, linking requirements with tests and defects, and analyzing the requirements.
Test plan: Enables you to develop a test plan. This includes defining goals and strategy, dividing your plan into categories, developing tests, automating tests were beneficial, linking tests with requirements and defects and analyzing the plan.
Test lab: Enables you to run tests on your application and analyze the results.
Defects: Enables you to add defects, determine repair priorities, repair open defects and analyze the data.

Depending on your Quality Center License, you may also have access to additional modules:

Business Components: Opens Business process Testing, the Mercury test Automation solution that enables subject matter experts to drive the quality optimization process.

Dashboard: Opens Mercury Dashboard, the Mercury platform that enables IT teams to track application readiness in real time and manage project risk.

User privileges

Quality Center enables you to manage user access to a project by creating a list of authorized users and assigning each user a password and user group, you can control the kinds of additions and modifications each user makes to the project.

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